Published 4:00 am, Friday, November 24, 1995

Actors are only as good as the chances they get. Take Frank Whaley, a young actor who has been banging around in minor roles in good movies ("Pulp Fiction") and in big roles in bad movies ("Career Opportunities") for the past few years.

With his plain looks and Bob's Big Boy hairstyle, Whaley has, by turns, come across as either innocuous or irritatingly ingratiating. But now he's finally in a movie in which he shows what he can do -- "Homage," opening today at the Roxie. And watching him here, you just have to say . . . wow. Who knew?

He plays a mathematical genius who becomes obsessed with a TV star and kills her. To tell that gives away nothing. He kills her in the movie's first scene. Two-thirds of "Homage" shows the events leading up to the murder. The last third shows the aftermath.

SIMILAR TO REAL CASE

It's easy to speculate that the screenplay, adapted by Mark Medoff from his play ("The Homage That Follows"), takes its inspiration from the tragic murder of Rebecca Schaeffer, a sitcom and film actress who was shot by a deranged fan in 1989. But the circumstances of the murder in "Homage" are very different.

Whaley plays Archie, a math whiz who talks his way into a job

managing the New Mexico farm of a middle-aged widow named Katherine (Blythe Danner). He's a needy motor-mouth, but his intelligence and vulnerability endear him to Katherine, who also happens to be the mother of Lucy Samuel (Sheryl Lee), a TV star.

"Homage" is not about a diabolical plot but about something more interesting -- the allure of celebrity acting on an unbalanced mind. Archie's obsession with Lucy doesn't begin until she comes to spend time on the farm with her mother, but once she's there, he's all over her.

When she turns down his invitation to dinner, he steals her journals, spies on her in the bathroom and tries to persuade her to make a film from his screenplay -- a sadistic sexual space fantasy. Stiff, clueless and hiding behind his vocabulary, Archie goes from annoying to obnoxious to downright eerie in Whaley's superb performance.

Equally good is Danner, who is too busy ironing out her troubled relationship with her daughter to recognize that Archie is a disaster waiting to happen. Lucy is a hard- drinking, rather ordinary woman who has become an object of fantasy, playing a prostitute on a top- rated TV show.

Its exploration of the impact of celebrity gives "Homage" some satiric elements. Bruce Davison plays a public defender, who, like everyone else, is impressed by Sheryl's stardom. Later, defending her killer, he's giddy at being acknowledged by People magazine.

TENSION BUILDS

But Medoff and director Ross Marks treat the murder and the events leading up to it with complete seriousness. As the time draws near -- and Archie takes up undressing in front of a mirror and screaming at his reflection -- the film becomes unsettling. It says something for Whaley that by the end, everyone in the audience wants to choke him.

Like the film itself, the cinematography stays just this side of realism, with exceptionally vivid shots of a New Mexico landscape of rich green fields, a violet sky and puffy white clouds that start just a few feet from the ground.